Invite Russia to Join NATO

The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that we have no collective memory. The failures in Iraq and especially Afghanistan were evidence of that. Now, a war in eastern Europe came into the news like a tropical storm and newscasters are already impatient that it  has dragged on for a week. Basically, we do not know what it is like to harbor a 1000-year grudge. And that informs our weakness regarding China whose gerontocracy executes petty criminals in order to harvest their organs. China has a 300-year plan and the people who formulated it intend to see it through.

Old times there are not forgotten.
Saints Cyril and Basil brought Roman religion.
Alexander Nevsky defeated German invaders.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we Americans think that whatever the situation was in 1990 was set eternally even backward in time. We toss out proper nouns like “France” and “Germany” that obscure the histories of Burgundy and Champagne, Saxony and Swabia and a hundred other locations which themselves were only the places where nomads ceased wandering. Andulsia in Spain was the new home of Germanic Vandals (Vandalusia) and even today, in Spanish, your brother and sister are not rooted in the Latin (frater and soros) but hermano and hermana: your Germans. So, as much as I enjoyed sharing Yule Brenner as Taras Bulba with my Ukrainian chums in junior high school, I have to ask: What makes the Ukraine a nation? And what makes it worth killing and dying for? 

 

The extension of Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries

The long and deep truth is that Russia faces West because the East has little to offer, except stunning landscapes, Mongols and Tartars. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Moscow became the Third Rome. Peter the Great was a welcomed visitor in England (which was not yet Great Britain or the United Kingdom). He brought savants of all kinds, (Leonhard Euler for one) from Europe to his new capital. That continued in the 19^th century. Friedrich Georg Struve of the Pulkovo Observatory also went by his Russian name: Vasily Yakovich Struve. That trans-national association continued even when another Struve was in charge of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. 

The Communist Revolution changed the relationship between Russia and the West. They set themselves apart as the enemies of capitalism and were not surprised when the UK and USA invaded. To get out of World War I, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding the Ukraine and the Baltic States. That was superseded by the Versailles Treaty, though Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland became recognized (by the Allies) as independent nations. Poland became a nation (again). Czecho-Slovakia and Jugoslavia were created from the Austrian empire. (They broke apart after 1990 because they had no reason to be unified.) Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria had fascist or pro-Nazi governments. Hungary sent troops into Russia alongside the German invaders. With the defeat of Germany, Russia protected itself with a wall of puppet states. 

Borders are fluid.
Left to Right: 1914, 1942, 1945

 

In response, the USA and the UK created NATO, which, oddly enough included Turkey. Not bordering the North Atlantic, Turkey had been an ally of Germany and then technically neutral until August 1944, finally declaring war on Germany only on 23 February 1945. During the Cold War, the USA placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In response the USSR put missiles in Cuba. And America was outraged. 

 

It is important not to fall in to moral relativism or equivalency. It makes a difference who rules. Liberal democracy means free trade and free minds. The Ukraine was a relatively benign place once the Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych was removed by the Revolution of Dignity. Russia has seldom been a benign place no matter who ruled. Benign neglect was the best that the Romanov tsars could deliver. 

 

In George Orwell’s 1984, the point is made that the incessant three-way wars are not intended for conquest or even victory, but as excuses to terrorize their own peoples into obedience. As O’Brien says to Winston Smith: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” When Donald Trump was President, he was friends with Vladimir Putin and China was the enemy with virus bioweapons. I did not vote for Trump, but I knew that if Hillary Clinton were elected, Russia would become the new enemy and we would be friends with China. 

Russia has nothing to lose.

It just seems to me that the war in the Ukraine could have been avoided. Russia did not want the Ukraine to join NATO. That is easy to understand. One solution could have been to bring Russia into NATO. Open Russia to the West. It is really all they ever wanted.

 

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Monsters from the Id

Monsters from the Id: Science is Mankind’s Last Great Hope a film by David Gargani.

Science fiction movies of the 1950s, despite their obvious faults, inspired a generation to become scientists.  In the films, whatever the problems – even when caused by scientists – they brought the solution.  They were heroes.  And they got the girl. Sometimes, the scientist even was the girl, an exception to mainstream cinema and fiction generally.  That point is not in this documentary.  That oversight is one of several, in a generally outstanding effort.

In the words of director, Dave Gargani

The 1950s was an idealistic time in American History, filled with hope, opportunity, and wonder. It was also, "The Atomic Age" where new technology promised to both save humanity as well as put it in jeopardy. All of these factors gave birth to one of the most prolific genres in film history, 1950s Science Fiction Cinema. More then just bug-eyed monsters and little green men, 1950s Sci-fi Cinema provided science inspiration for millions of eager youths across the country. Then after 1957 and the launch of Sputnik, science fiction became science fact as an inspired population worked toward one of the greatest achievements of mankind, spaceflight. Monsters From The Id weaves the intersecting themes of over thirty classic films in order to tell the untold story of the Modern Scientist and his role in inspiring a nation. The film continues to explore the psychological and cultural impact of 1950s Sci-Fi cinema in America and asks, "where is science inspiration found today?"

 The interviews center on Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys which became the film October Skies).   Physics professor Leroy Dubeck also comments. He teaches from his book Fantastic Voyages (reviewed on NecessaryFacts here) to deliver science via science fiction. Professor of film studies Patrick Lucanio (Smokin’ Rockets and Killers from Mars) is an historian.  Also speaking  is his co-author for Smokin’ Rockets, Gary Coville.  Rounding out the live presenters is a film critic from New Zealand, Richard Scheib, who offers more suggestive hints than substance, another of the flaws in this gem.

http://monstersfromtheid.net/

The 92-minute presentation focuses entirely on the 1950s.  But science fiction cinema continued beyond that, and continued to inspire.  Also, a shift in our society moved scifi film and the s.f. genre generally away from that traditional optimism for technology.  The fulcrum was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Star Wars (1977) was the lever.  In 2001, technology failed and we did not find out why until 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984).  By then, some restoration could be found, for instance in Brainstorm and Star Trek: The Movie.  The fact remains that Star Wars absorbed our attention, like the Blob, with no heroic teenagers to come to the rescue: a “hokey old religion” defeated a “technological terror.”  We moved away from hard science – perhaps because it was hard to do.  Physics is not easy, even if books such as The Dancing Wu Li Masters made it seem easy.  Once, in a class at Lansing Community College, our professor got tired of doing our homework on the board.  He said that any of us would go out in the back yard and shoot hoops for 45 minutes and not make a single shot and still claim to have had a good time. “How long do you spend on a problem?” he asked rhetorically.

A “next generation” did follow exploring with Jean-Luc Picard and continuing for 20 years through the Star Trek universe. Today, Star Trek continues. We have some reason to predict success, at least for some of the nerds.  (See the many citations to Big Bang Theory on this blog.)

At the same time the computer revolution of the 1980s also added kindling to reignite the fire.  War Games touted the hacker.  But Tron 2 Point Oh made the beta version look great.  The most heroic computerist in recent film was Matt Ferrell (“feral”) in Live Free or Die Hard.  Though he employs his hacker skills to help John McClain, Matt makes his day with a gun, becoming “that guy” who blasts away when no one else can, getting shot (but only wounded) and smiling while the medics patch him up.

And that leaves out all the other sciences. Perhaps the essential characteristic of the scientists of the 1950s film – also not mentioned in Monsters of the Id – is that they are generalists: “scientists.”  Dr. Patricia Medford (Them) was an entomologist, just as we met physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians.  However, each of them was an artesian well of information about anything that needed to be explained at the moment.   Science is not an object or a subject, but a method.  While other people rely on faith (superstition) or force (the military solution), the scientist reasons from facts and tests her hypothesis.  

And at the end of the movie, after the guns are packed away, and the pews are empty, the scientist wonders what else is out there…

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